


Done and Undone.

by Azgrave



Category: Gypsy (US TV)
Genre: Angst, ramble, this is a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 10:12:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15532008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azgrave/pseuds/Azgrave
Summary: This world isn’t pretty. It isn’t shiny. It isn’t new. And it sure as hell doesn’t scream Perfect. But she gets it. Gets it in the way that only a patient person can get a thing. By starting with the hard outline and tracing each intertwined piece until she can get to the raw center. Coiled and beating like an exposed heart.





	Done and Undone.

**Author's Note:**

> This is...literally just a ramble. I felt rusty and just needed to get in a head space. But why not throw it out there or whatever.

This world isn’t pretty. It isn’t shiny. It isn’t new. And it sure as hell doesn’t scream _Perfect._ But she gets it. Gets it in the way that only a patient person can get a thing. By starting with the hard outline and tracing each intertwined piece until she can get to the raw center. Coiled and beating like an exposed heart.

She tangles her fingers around it and she makes it _bend._

It isn’t hard. At least, it’s not nearly as hard as one would think. All you need to know are the rules. The guidelines. The _pervasive behaviors_. It was difficult once, when she was younger, when she _didn’t_ really understand. But a normal, correction: average (she’s seen and heard to many things to believe anyone is _normal_ anymore), person doesn’t have nearly as steely a backbone as they think. Doesn’t have even an iota of the power over themselves as they think. Because when you know how the system works, when you can slip silvered words down synapses and fire just the right electrical thoughts, you can control (with a reasonable margin of error) exactly what you want to happen.

People are _predictable_.

She doesn’t want to sound overconfident about it. Doesn’t want to come off as being arrogant. But, honestly, It’s just…this is what she does. This is what she’s dedicated her time to. Her life too. (She’ll never be able to unsee how to do this. How to have this hold.) She’s had too much practice.

It is _literally_ her practice, her profession.

And she’s gotten so very good at it.

So very good at knowing _just_ what to say. What to do. How to thread the needle of an idea _just so_ and tug _just right_ so it feels like an idea they’ve come up with all on their own.

People _hate_ being told what to do. Hate being _controlled._

She gets that too. The feeling of being dictated. Confined in a relationship. Restrained by opinions. Contained by circumstance. Caged by pretenses. (Mothers. Husbands. Children. Friends. The very life you’re living.)

She isn’t sure when she realized it. When she first felt the oppressive weight. The notion that she was being limited. When she felt the manacles cutting into the skin around her wrists. A weight that had been there, that pre-dated her ability to _see, to weave, to keep herself free_.

Whether it was _before_ Sidney or _after_. Like the girl herself was some kind of an event.

(She kind of is though, isn’t she?)

She was a curiosity. A thread in the fabric of Sam that she wanted to pull. At least that’s how it started. But when she finally got to see her, (really see her) she realized just how much of a mistake she’d made. All that time spent working through the knots of his being, listening and tracing the lines, thinking he was the whole picture. She’d had it backwards all along. Sidney wasn’t a thread to tug and shift to make Sam move.

She was _a whole damn tapestry._

It’s not her first mistake. (She knows that.) It’s not her last. (She guesses.) She knows no one is infallible. She’s…prideful. But even she knows she can be wrong about _some_ things. She just has no idea exactly how wrong she is about this. About what’s happening. About exactly who’s in control. (About who the players in this game even really are.)

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t even try to see. (The hand is dealt, and she’s betting blind.)

She admits, a bit slowly, somewhere between that first Rabbit Hole Americano and the first time she slips her fingers into the mangled tresses of her hair that Sidney turns out to be more than a curiosity. Her shape is an anomaly. No matter which way she turns her, no matter what line she traces, she can’t find the delicate center. She can’t find the beating soft core. She’s this alien, amorphous thing that she wants to dig her fingers into and _rip apart._

But she can’t find purchase.

And while she fumbles, searching, failing to find the beginning or the end of what she knows _has_ to be there (the conventions, the guidelines, the _pervasive behaviors_ of the average person tell her so) she forgets something. Forgets maybe the most important thing.

She’s not the only one who can see the fabric. Who can manipulate the weave. She’s so used to being the one with the flawless grip and tug, the faultless silvered words finding their mark. It’s part narcissism, part obsession, the way she’s failing to see clearly. (She gets it. Later. When it’s too late.)

Sidney makes her a frantic mess as she slips her lithely ‘round her fingertips. Has her cutting the dead weight of every game she’s losing control over as she caresses the skin of her ear with a kiss while she makes havok trails down her spine.

It’s like a snowball. Rolling downhill. It happens so subtly that she barely notices herself coming undone. Barely notices everything catching fire around her until she’s _literally_ running to set fire to the fingerprints laced over everything she’s touched.

Maybe worse, she barely notices just how quickly she starts losing control of the line between Jean and Diane. Of which is the mask and which is the reality. Which is the secret she’s hiding from the world. Like every time she peels a new layer back, it’s everything transposed just a little differently than she remembered it before, but the names are all mixed up. Now she’s lying best when she’s telling the truth. It’s too hard for her to admit that sometimes she _wants_ both. Wants her husband, her family, her life, but goddamn she _Wants_ Sidney too. There’s something else to admit there, but she doesn’t have all the pieces yet. It’s too hard to see until it’s actually happening.

When she finally gets it, when she finally _sees_ it’s honestly too late to recover. Jean is so used to winning, is so used to being the one in perfect, complete control, that she isn’t sure what to feel when Diane loses the game. (It’s like Sidney is playing with a stacked deck against her. And she is. Sort of.)

She’s halfway through her speech at the podium when it finally _, finally_ clicks. Her world shifts in an instant while attentive parents and children (Her husband. Her child.) watch her like she’s the only thing happening in the room. (She isn’t. Not exactly. They just don’t know enough to see the lives colliding.)

_“And I promise, I’m gonna be all in. I’ll commit to you entirely. I’ll give up everything.”_ She’d said it. She’d opened her mouth and uttered the words, because the fear of losing what you have can be so utterly powerful. It can swamp you. And by the time she’s speaking at the podium, when the panic of the moment has subsided, she knows. She knows more clearly than she ever could have before.

She did this to herself.

Sidney whispered words and pulled threads and shook her fabric because Sidney wasn’t playing by the rules. She wasn’t playing in line with the conventions. And she sure as hell didn’t behave like the average person. Sidney didn’t have a soft center, a beating core to found and plied. She just _was._ She couldn’t find the edge between the person Sidney was and the person she pretended to be _because there wasn’t one_.

She could taste the jealousy, even if only for a moment, at the tightening noose around her neck while Sidney was a thing that couldn’t be chained.

She feels her eyes again, before she sees them. All shadows under the obtuse light. She still knows the damn shape of her.

She had tried so hard to throw up one last fatal defense, to save the fracturing façade that held her two lives separate. But she’s tired. God she hasn’t realized how exhausted she is. And she knows, she knows the way she’s probably always known, somewhere deep down (maybe that’s a lie. Or maybe it isn’t.) that this was always going to happen eventually. There was always going to be someone better at the game.

Eventually she’d lose.

She just didn’t know it would happen in the dark. That it would happen with bourbon on her tongue while Sidney threaded their breath together. While Sidney searched for the truth, one hand digging through the vast mess of Diane to get to Jean, while she has the other busy, slipped inside overpriced lingerie.

No.

With Sidney on one side, eyes piercing through the dark to see Diane, face perfectly displaying exactly what she should be most afraid of. “ _I found you. I see you.”_

With her family, Michael and Dolly, sat on the other, watching her (watching Jean) deliver this “Bullying” speech, seeing the thinly veiled confession of all her loose and fraying ends.

She makes a decision. Makes it as easily as the lies that fall from her lips as she slips from one life to another.

She’s letting go. With a smile. Soft. Like the damn Mona Lisa. Watching Sidney watch her.

(Everything looks so grand when you’re staring up from the bottom.)

She’s not one for chains either.

She would rather burn everything to the ground. Warm her hands on the flames. Melt the manacles from wrists.


End file.
